Pink for Danger
On the road with an Agent of Angels
[Eyyy! You remember Agent of Angels? I imagined that tale as a standalone, a quirky little dream vision. The angelic agent, or Keeper as he calls himself, has been tasked to guard a mortal called Willow, but he’s lost her. Even with the best guardian angels, I suppose it does happen. Anyhow, I was going to leave it at that, but turns out there’s more. The Keeper and our unnamed narrator are whizzing down the highway in search of Willow, and as they talk, things get really weird.
Meanwhile, Agent of Angels suggested a whole ‘nother set of stories: the Mad Art Project. I hope it’s not too confusing to see a different cast of characters playing out the same starting problem: a missing woman and a mission to find her. But y’all are smart. You’ll keep everything straight. For starters, this one has angels.
Finally, I’ve turned on paid subscriptions. When I get enough filthy lucre to get a good mic, I might read y’all some stories. And if you haven’t examined the fine print for a while: If you’re one of my paid subscribers, I’ll write you a bespoke story! Just reach out in the comments and ask.]
There’s a bedroom with paneled walls and sticky brown carpet and piles of tied-off garbage bags filled with quilts, baby clothes, every kind of household linen. Toddler basketball goal, toddler horse with wheels, window with green blinds dragging off the hooks on one side, closet doors jammed permanently open because the cardboard boxes and stuffed-full garbage bags inside the closet have spilled out to claim half the floor. Bedside table, lamp, wadded-up tissue, Tiger Balm tin, clock with glowing orange numbers spelling out the time: 5:46 A.M.
Daylight filters above that heavy window curtain, light enough to show form but not too much color.
It’s cold.
Inside the bedroom there’s a single bed with a couple of flat pillows and a greasy-slick sheet. On the bed, warm where we touch or the comforters cover us, cold everywhere else, I’m making love to two men.
Or being made love to by them.
It’s all very confusing.
They’re pretty hefty guys, not fat, you know, but solid and kinda short from what I can tell. Golden hair, blunt features, thick fingers, thick cocks.
I think they’re maybe 50 years old.
I wake up on my belly with these two strangers more or less blocking me from turning over or moving much at all — and believe me, I’m not trying, it isn’t too often I get an opportunity like this — but now somehow I get flipped on my back with a clear view of the ceiling.
Yup, there we are, in the dull, crazed mirror — mirror? — three men, broad brown backs, jeans halfway down or all the way off, knees and elbows popping out of the blanket in snatches before someone’s hand pulls the blanket back — told you it was cold in here, right? — and I just feel a velvety inner thigh against my cheek, just turn my head to nuzzle into it, seeing out of the tail of my eye the man in the mirror turn his head against the thigh of his brother, his double, his, my —
We are three men in this bed.
I also am a man.
When I fell asleep, I was definitely not a man.
We have the same hair, the same face, the same — I smell my wrist — smell. We are not brothers, even triplets.
We are the same man. We are one.
The alarm pulses like a cicada.
Back in the car we crest Missionary Ridge, again following the old highway pattern, the sickening swoop. Up the hill to our left long horizontals of pink neon light trace the balcony and roofline of the low-hunkered, rent-by-the-week motel.
The Keeper glances at me. I see a pucker around his eyebrows.
He’s no longer wearing a dove-colored suit. I suppose he’s changed for evening; he now has on jeans, an indigo-colored turtleneck and some kind of heavy gleaming watch with lots of dials on it.
We have not gotten out of the car. Close as I can remember, I’ve been thinking about last night — with the additional detail that I was a boy, can’t think how I missed that one — and narrating it to him the whole while.
No phone booth, no TARDIS, no magic lasso. So where the hell, how the hell did he change clothes? I’m still wearing greasy jeans and a not-too-old Sonoma t-shirt from Kohl’s, my good, go-to-potluck-dinners t-shirt with the blue paisley pattern.
The Keeper’s voice calls me back from my puzzling.
“I can see how that could be disconcerting,” he says. “And I wish I could help. But I’m not human. And I don’t, I can’t make love the way humans do anyhow. If I tried it would be a simulacrum, you see. And what you describe sounds fairly real.”
“So real.”
“I was asleep last night, not doing — whatever that was. I rest when you mortals rest. From a practical standpoint it’s the best time.” He shifts gears and roars past a state trooper, provocatively close. The trooper ignores us.
I ask, “So all the Keepers in North America sleep when North Americans do, and all the ones in China — ”
I see him smile, laughing at me, but kindly. “Yes, they sleep when Chinese mortals do. They’re not, literally speaking, on the other side of the world when they sleep, but you are, you see. I mean their mortals are.”
“Yes, I understand that. You coordinate schedules with us.”
He nods. We drive. The interior of the car is sleek and black, whispery black leather seats, glassy black control panel, steering wheel that looks wickedly ergonomic.
Light-up billboards beside the highway cast streaks across the black. Red for Coca-Cola, white and blue for Tennessee Oncology Group. A billboard from the 1980s, a billboard from last year.
“But why was I you?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. My memory of the dream’s so vivid I tip the passenger-side sunshield down and look in the mirror to see if I really have turned into a golden-haired man.
But no. I peer at my own face. Same gray hair, same short, practical cut. Same gray eyes, ruddy skin, square jaw, big nose, visible pores, trace of rosacea across the chin. I may still be 50—or 40 or 60, I’m forgetting exactly—but anyhow I’m not the sort of 50 they hire to play James Bond. I’m the sort of 50 they hire to work as a lunch lady.
Or deliver packages for a shady courier service, of course.
He’s been thinking about my question. “You must have dreamed yourself as me because I’m the only Keeper you know. You didn’t know you were a Keeper yet, you see.”
“But I didn’t know anything about it, last night.” I flip the mirror shut and the sunshield up. “Why did I dream about you at all?”
“Because I was looking for you. My dream called you to me.”
“And why were there three of us? Who was the other one?”
At that he smiles, a big smile for the first time, flashing teeth. “There are infinite of us, well, not infinite, but as many as there are mortals living, less those who’ve sacrificed themselves, of course, plus every Keeper has his Keeper and — anyhow, you saw three because your imagination wouldn’t let you see six, or 14, or 30, or 62, is my guess.”
“That’s — ”
“Flip the script,” he says. “Make us girls. Worker bees in a hive. Can you picture that better?”
Not really, but I nod.
He takes my hand. “When we sleep, we are one,” he says. “Not just you, me, but all of us. You are my sister. And now we have found you.”
Then he lets me go. Again that kindly laughing glance. “And we aren’t making love when we sleep, nothing like it, but that’s probably the nearest your mind could come up with to represent the reunion we experience.”
“Darn it.” I seize my courage. “I was hoping for more.”
I can’t tell in this light, but he might be blushing. “You make me wish I’d been there.”
“Sucks to be you, I guess.”
He laughs out loud, this stranger, and suddenly the awkwardness dissolves and everything swings into place: this is my comrade, my brother, in a strange way, my self.
And we have to find Willow.
Something flickers at my consciousness:
No one understands that, either, how 15 minutes of kindness from a person with no heart is like the two coins from the widow in the Bible, literally all they have to give —
I thought that, didn’t I, recently, about someone? Someone I know, someone who needs me —
I try to picture this someone, then the context of the conversation, who I was speaking with, or maybe just in the same room with while I thought —
Thought what?
It’s gone.
My head aches right down the center, as if the ache is between the two hemispheres of my brain, but when I try to pinpoint that ache I can’t find it and then I wonder if I imagined it. My thoughts feel muffled.
Lights slash past, veering across the Keeper’s neck, my thighs, orange for caution, pink for danger —
Looking back, I can still see those lights. I can remember the Keeper’s hand turning the dial as if he’s tuning in to a radio channel I can’t hear. Gold glints on his knuckles. But I don’t remember where we went, that night.
So much has been lost.
Last I recall from that conversation in the car I ask him, “Tell me about Willow.” And he puts his hand on the back of my neck, two fingers behind my right ear, thumb behind my left ear.
And with him, I see her:
Willow. I know her name without anyone telling me, even before I realize the is the Willow the Keeper showed me in the photograph.
She’s a young mixed woman, but not so youthful up close, might-be-17 dials in fast to could-be-39 when you see her eyes. She’s tall and bony and graceful. Her skin’s pale gold, but the hollows under her cheekbones and at her temples are grayish, and the circles under her eyes are truly gray. She wears her cloud of hair in a puff at the crown of her head. A wide blue headband covers the edges, its color matching the blue of her nursing scrubs.
She’s glancing over her left shoulder.
Now I realize why I thought she had a fairy’s profile. She looks like a gelfing out of The Dark Crystal, you remember the winged girl who gives her life for the boy?
Her right hand’s caught one toddler by the back of the shirt as he dove off the back of the sofa. His arms are spread wide. His dimpled fingers clutch air.
Her left hand holds a spoon. Cake batter splatters in an arc toward the floor.
On the other side of the sofa, out of her field of vision as she looks over her shoulder, two kids are wrestling in front of a television where Charmander battles a flock of Spearow. The little sofa-diver, no doubt, was pretending to be one of the avian-type Pokémon.
On the sofa, an old woman stares at the television. She’s been sewing. Dial in on the pink polyester fabric in her lap, and you see a meaningless collection of stitches.
Willow’s living the life my mother and sisters live, I think with a mix of fear and selfish relief, the life I’ve spent all my days fighting to avoid.
Then I look at Willow’s face again. I follow her eyes.
She gazes over her left shoulder into the kitchen doorway behind her. A shadow of some unseen person — he must be very tall — stretches out the doorway and across the floor.
The shadow touches her heart.